Kazakstan

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT KAZAKSTAN - PAGE 2

Amoco Corp.'s Norwegian subsidiary said it has made an oil and gas discovery off North Norway that could produce as much as 200 million to 500 million barrels of oil equivalents. Further drilling is needed to determine the exact size of the find, as well as the ratio of oil to gas, Amoco said. Separately, Amoco and other Western oil companies are urging the government of Kazakstan to back a $500 million plan to export oil by barge across the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan and then to the Mediterranean Sea by existing pipelines.

Former Kazak Prime Minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin, a key political opponent of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, was detained in an elite Moscow hospital Saturday under threat of extradition. A duty officer at the Russian Prosecutor General's Office said Kazhegeldin was taken into custody by police at a Moscow airport on Friday evening at the request of Interpol, and that he might be handed over to the Kazak authorities. Kazhegeldin's wife said she had sent a letter to President Boris Yeltsin asking the Kremlin leader to intervene on her husband's behalf and called the incident a political act. Kazhegeldin is accused by the Kazak authorities of financial misdemeanors related to tax evasion and property in Belgium.

Several years ago, I was invited to a ritzy private dinner at a Washington club that served as a reminder of how much of what's really and truly important in the world plays out under the media radar screen. It was a dinner hosted by a famous power broker, attorney Robert Strauss, to fete a short, stocky man named Nursultan Nazarbayev, an autocratic communist who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, was elected president of the republic of Kazakstan. As my tablemate, the head of a major oil company who detests Washington, put it, this affair was clearly "big time."

"I FOUND THE MOST FASCINATING ARTIFACTS on my first trip to Morocco, so I told my designer to make the bedroom wild and dramatic," explains Michele Lowrance, a Cook County divorce judge. That was in 1990, and interior designer John Philip Ansehl, who travels between New York and L.A., exceeded her expectations, mooring the setting with yards and yards of filmy peach silk Lowrance adores to this day. But his pice de rZsistance was spontaneous. "I took all the incredible jewelry she bought and draped it on the bedposts," he reminisces.

Anyone who watched the preliminary round of men's hockey has to be anxious for the NHL players to arrive. The four opening games were riddled with careless play--defensemen dropping blind back passes behind their own blue line, for example--that, if nothing else, created a lot of scoring chances. Fittingly, most of those chances were muffed. Germany, which is waiting for the arrival of NHL All-Star goalie Olaf Kolzig of the Washington Capitals, got a lift when backup Joseph Heiss made 20 saves in a 3-1 victory over Japan.

ALMATY (Reuters) - Kazakhstan's longest serving prime minister, Karim Masimov, has resigned after nearly six years at the helm of the largest economy in Central Asia, the presidential press service said on Monday. Masimov, 47, was appointed prime minister in January 2007. A loyalist to President Nursultan Nazarbayev fluent in several languages, he is credited with having maintained economic growth in Kazakhstan through the worst of the global financial crisis. Nazarbayev accepted his resignation in a decree published on the presidential website, http://www.akorda.kz.

He seems like such a different man today. When I first met Kazak President Nursultan Nazarbaev here in the winter of 1992, he was an open, spirited man, filled with hope for the future of his country and relatively informal in his demeanor. Kazakstan was, for the first time in history, a free nation, and he was the New Age's "golden boy" who would automatically bring democracy and prosperity here. The president, just elected for another seven-year term, and despite his increasingly autocratic mien, has indicated within the last year that even this officially rigid and partially Sovietized world of Central Asia can change with the times.

A second round of voting for a new parliament in Kazakstan will be held next week because some candidates failed to get the required number of votes, a news agency said Sunday. The Central Election Commission announced the results of the election Oct. 10 and said that only 20 candidates received the required number of votes to win a seat in the new 77-seat parliament, or Majlis, Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency reported. The Otan, or Fatherland, party--which is associated with the current government--will get four of 10 party-reserved seats, while the three runners-up will get 2 each, ITAR-Tass said.

Three Russian cosmonauts, including a former aide to President Boris Yeltsin, landed in the Kazak desert Tuesday after a flawless descent from the Mir space station. The Soyuz TM-27 spacecraft touched down at 9:23 a.m. Moscow time near the town of Arkalyk in north-central Kazakstan. It carried crew commander Talgat Musabayev and his colleague Nikolai Budarin, who spent 207 days on board the Mir, and former presidential adviser Yuri Baturin, who spent 12 days there performing scientific experiments.